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What Can Rational Investors Do About Excessive Volatility and Sentiment Fluctuations?

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Author Info
Bernard Dumas
Alexander Kurshev
Raman Uppal
Abstract

Our objective is to understand the trading strategy that would allow an investor to take advantage of "excessive" stock price volatility and "sentiment" fluctuations. We construct a general equilibrium model of sentiment. In it, there are two classes of agents and stock prices are excessively volatile because one class is overconfident about a public signal. This class of irrational agents changes its expectations too often, sometimes being excessively optimistic, sometimes being excessively pessimistic. We find that because irrational traders introduce an additional source of risk, rational investors reduce the proportion of wealth invested into equity except when they are extremely optimistic about future growth. Moreover, their optimal portfolio strategy is based not just on a current price divergence but also on a prediction concerning the speed of convergence. Thus, the portfolio strategy includes a protection in case there is a deviation from that prediction. We find that long maturity bonds are an essential accompaniment of equity investment, as they serve to hedge this "sentiment risk." The answer to the question posed in the title is: "There is little that rational investors can do optimally to exploit, and hence, eliminate excessive volatility, except in the very long run."

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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number 11803.

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Date of creation: Nov 2005
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Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:11803

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G1 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets

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(explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)

  1. Wei Xiong & Hongjun Yan, 2006. "Heterogeneous Expectations and Bond Markets," NBER Working Papers 12781, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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